Word: cklin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is not the only new work in Venice this year to extract some poetry from the archaic or mythic past. There are, for instance, the canvases of Christopher Lebrun, a young Englishman whose thickly mortared landscapes featuring cypresses, caverns and the winged horse Pegasus have a Böcklin-like drama that is not wholly the result of judicious quotation. But quotation does rule. This Biennale has more plaster casts in it than the cellar of a Viennese art academy: the abused relics of antiquity dragged back as conceptual décor for a dying art tradition...
...raised partly in Greece-where his father, an engineer, planned and built railroads-he led a long, productive life, almost Picassian in length; he died in 1978. He had studied in Munich, and in his early 20s, under the spell of a symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, he began to produce a series of strange, oneiric cityscapes. When they were seen in Paris after 1911, they were ecstatically hailed by painters and poets from Picasso to Paul Eluard; before long De Chirico became one of the heroes of surrealism...
...paintings. Another favorite site, Turin's Piazza Vittorio Veneto, is surrounded on three sides by plain, deep-shadowed arcades; these serried slots of darkness are the obsessive motif of De Chirico's cityscape. He may have grasped their poetic opportunities through looking at Böcklin's paintings of Italian arcades, but no painter ever made an architectural feature more...
...lilies are the ancestors of art nouveau-of genii and weird, pale cherubs is so exquisitely designed and rendered with such pantheistic conviction that it attains the force of religious art. The spiritualist urge lasted far into the 19th century. Its last major bearer was Arnold Böcklin-a Swiss, but included in this show by adoption, as it were. Böcklin's painting of the Island of the Dead, 1880, had every reason to survive: theatrical it may be, but that spectacle of a white-wrapped priest, borne silently on the coffin-bearing barge toward...